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Exploring animals’ emotional experiences

By Tiffany O'Callaghan

Jonathan Balcombe’s The Exultant Ark is an exploration of the nascent research into animal pleasure, replete with emotive photographs

AS ANIMAL behaviourist Jonathan Balcombe sees it, too often the animal kingdom is portrayed solely as a realm of dire and perpetual struggle for survival. He argues that observations of playfulness or expressions of pleasure by non-human creatures of all stripes, feathers and fins are depicted as nothing more than evolutionary adaptation.

The Exultant Ark, his pictorial exploration of pleasure among creatures from primate to porpoise, challenges this idea. It intersperses glorious images of animals preening, grooming …